Freebee Friday: Boom or Bust

What’s the best way to teach kids about finance, stocks
and how the stock market works? Try Wall Street Magnate, a free online simulation
of the world of securities trading. Each student starts with $100,000 of
simulated money to start an investment portfolio with stocks, bonds and funds.
After that they can track the value of individual items and the portfolio’s
total value on a day-to-day basis as well as buy and sell items. Because it
uses actual data from the markets, Wall Street Magnate is eerily similar to the
real world of finance, except that no actual money is used.

An entire class can be set up as a club in Wall Street Magnate
so that members can share information, investment strategies and trading tactics.
The site provides access to the latest news reports and trading data as well as
trade data that is delayed by 15 minutes. There’s a great primer on how to use
the program and get started although it lacks suggested lesson plans and a curriculum
guide. In addition to tracking a class’s returns, Wall Street Magnate has five
levels of return and uses live data, making it seem more real than other
simulations. Who knows, the next George Soros or Warren Buffett might be in
your class.

TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e54faaf86b883301910489cb47970c